Integrated circuit technology relies on transistors to formulate vast arrays of functional circuits. The complexity of these circuits requires the use of an ever increasing number of linked transistors. As the number of transistors required increases, the integrated circuitry dimensions shrink. One challenge in the semiconductor industry is to develop improved methods for electrically connecting and packaging circuit devices which are fabricated on the same and on different wafers or chips. It is an objective in the semiconductor industry to construct transistors which occupy less surface area on the silicon chip/die.
As integrated circuit technology progresses there is a growing desire for a "system on a chip." Ideally, a computing system would be fabricated with all the necessary integrated circuits on one wafer, as compared with today's method of fabricating many chips of different functions and packaging them to assemble. a complete system. Such a structure would greatly improve integrated circuit performance and provide higher bandwidth. In practice, it is very difficult with today's technology to implement a truly high-performance "system on a chip" because of vastly different fabrication processes and different manufacturing yields for the logic and memory circuits. Thus, what is needed is an improved method and structure which continues to approach the ideal set-up of a "system on a chip" and thus improves the integration of different chips in an integrated circuit.
For the reasons stated above, and for other reasons stated below which will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading and understanding the present specification, it is desirable to develop a structure and method to increase the operational speeds, or data bandwidth, between different circuit devices, e.g. logic and memory chips. It is further desirable to attain this ability using current CMOS fabrication techniques.